“Val”

“M’m.”

“I say”

“What, then?”

“What’s all this about the Etchingham agency?”

Val Stafford, smoking a well-earned pipe some hours later in the evening sunlight on the vicarage lawn, looked up at his brother over the Chronicle with a faint frown. “Who?”

“Ah! who?” said Rowsley, squatting cross-legged on the turf.

“Jack began on it this afternoon, and I had to switch him off, for I didn’t care to own that it was news to me.”

“There’s nothing in it at present.”

“The duke has offered me the management of his Etchingham property,” said Val unwillingly. “Oh no, not to give up Bernard: Etchingham, you see, marches with Wanhope and the two could be run together. He was awfully nice about it: would take what time I could give him: quite saw that Wanhope would have to come first.”

“How much?”

“Four hundred and an allowance for a house. Five, to be precise, which is what he is giving Mills: but of course I couldn’t take full time pay for a part-time job.”

Rowsley whistled.

“Yes, it would be very nice,” said Val, always temperate. “It would practically be 300 pounds, for I couldn’t go on taking my full 300 pounds from Bernard. I should get him to put on a young fellow to work under me.”

“It would make a lot of difference to you, even so.”

“To us,” Val corrected him. “Another pound a week would oil the wheels of Isabel’s housekeeping. And ” he hesitated, but having gone so far one might as well go on “it would enable me to do two things I’ve long set my heart on, only it was no use saying so: give you another hundred and fifty a year and insure my life in Isabel’s favour. It would lift a weight off my mind if I could do that. Suppose I were to die suddenly one never knows what would become of her? She’ll be able to earn her own living after taking her degree in October, but women’s posts are badly paid and it’s uncommonly hard to save. Oh yes, old boy, I know you’d look after her! But I don’t want her to be a drag on you: it’s bad enough now you never grumble, but I know what it’s like never to have a penny to spare. Times have changed since I was in the Army, but nothing alters the fact that it’s uncommonly unpleasant to be worse off than other fellows. I hate it for you all the more because you don’t grumble. It is a constant worry to me not to be able to put you in a better position.”

Rowsley had been too long inured to this paternal tenderness to be sensible of its touching absurdity on the lips of a man not much older than himself. But he was not a selfish youth, and he remonstrated with Val, though more like a son than a brother. “Yes, I dare say, but where do you come in? A stiff premium for Isabel and 50 pounds for Jim and 150 pounds for me doesn’t leave much change out of 300 pounds!”

“Oh, I’ve all I want. Living at home, I don’t get the chance of spending a lot of pocket money.”

“Why don’t you close at once?”

“Because I can’t get an answer out of Bernard. I’ve spoken to him but he won’t decide one way or the other. And he’s my master, and I can’t take on another job if he objects. That’s why I kept it dark at home: what’s the good of raising hopes that may be disappointed?”

“Pity you can’t chuck Bernard and take on Etchingham and the five hundred.”

“I should never do that,” said Val in the rare tone of decision which in him was final. “After all these years I could never leave Bernard in the lurch. I owe him too much.”

“As if the boot weren’t on the other leg!” Rowsley muttered. He was not mercenary none of Mr. Stafford’s children were: he saw eye to eye with Val in Val’s calm preference of six to eight hundred a year: but when Val carried his financial principles into the realm of sentiment Rowsley now and then lost his temper. His brother smiled at him, amused by his irritation, unmoved by it: other men’s opinions rarely had any weight with Val Stafford.

“Pax till it happens, at all events! Honestly I don’t think Bernard means to object: he’s been all smiles the last day or two Hyde’s coming has shaken him up and done him good

“Oh! Hyde!”

Val let fail his paper and looked curiously at Rowsley, whose tone was a challenge. “What is it now?”

“Do you like this chap Hyde?”

“That depends on what you mean by liking him. He’s not a bad specimen of his class.”

“What is his class? Do you know anything of his people?”

“Of his family I know little except that he has Jew blood in him and is very well off,” Val could have told his brother where the money came from, but forbore out of consideration for Lawrence, who might not care to have his connection with the Hyde Galleries known in Chilmark. “He came here because Lucian Selincourt asked him to see if he could do anything for Bernard.”

“I can’t see Hyde putting himself out of his way to oblige Mr. Selincourt.”

“If you ask me, Rose, I should say he had only just got back to England and was at a loose end. But there was a dash of good nature in it: he’s genuinely fond of Mrs. Clowes.”

“So I gathered,” said Rowsley. His tone was pregnant. Val sat silent for a moment.

“What rubbish! He hasn’t seen her for eight or ten years.”

“Since her marriage.” Val shrugged his shoulders. “Sorry, Val, but I cannot see Hyde staying on at Wanhope out of cousinly affection for Bernard Clowes. It must be a beastly uncomfortable house to stay in. Nicely run and all that, and they do you very well, but Bernard is distinctly an acquired taste. Oh, my dear chap!” as Val’s silence stiffened, “no one suggests that Laura’s ever looked at the fellow! But facts are facts, and Hyde is Hyde. I’m not a bit surprised to hear he has Jew blood in him,” Rowsley continued, warming to the discussion: he was a much keener judge of character that the tolerant and easy-going Val. “That accounts for the arty strain in him. Yvonne says he’s a thorough musician, and Jack told me Lord Grantchester took to him because he knew such a lot about pictures. Well, so he ought! He’s a Londoner. What does he know of the country? Only what you pick up at a big country-house party or a big shoot! He’s not the sort of chap to stay on at Wanhope for the pleasure of cheering up across-grained br a fellow like Bernard. Yes, he’s talking of staying on indefinitely: is going to send to town for one of his confounded cars. . . . And what other woman is there in Chilmark that he’d walk across the road to look at?”

“I’m not sure you’re fair to him.”

Rowsley turned up to his brother an amused, rather sweet smile. “Val, you’d pray for the devil?”

“Oh, Hyde isn’t a devil! I came pretty close to him ten years ago. He has a streak of generosity in him: no one knows that better than I do, for I’m in his debt. What? Oh! no, not in money matters: is that likely? But he’s capable of . . . magnanimity, one might call it,” Stafford fastidiously felt after precision: “no, he wouldn’t pursue Laura; he wouldn’t make her life harder than it is already.”

“He might propose to make it easier.” Rowsley threw a daisy at a cockchafer and missed it. “You and I are sons of a parsonage. We shouldn’t run off with a married lady because it would be against our principles.” His thin brown features were twisted into a faint grimace. Rowsley, like Val, possessed a satirical sense of humour, and gave it freer play than Val did. “It’s so difficult to shake off early prejudices. When Fowler and I were at the club the other day, we met a horrid little sweep who waxed confidential. I said I couldn’t make love to a married woman if I tried, and Fowler said he could but held rather not, and we walked off, but as I remarked to Fowler afterwards the funny thing was that it was true. I don’t see anything romantic in the situation. It strikes me as immoral and disgusting. But Hyde wouldn’t take a narrow view like mine. He has to live up to his tailor.”

“Oh, really, Rose!” Val gave his unwilling laugh. “You’re like Isabel, who can’t forgive him for sporting a diamond monogram.”

“No, but I’m interested. I know Jack’s limitations, and Jimmy’s, and yours, but Hyde’s I don’t know, and he intrigues me,” said Rowsley, lighting a cigarette with his agile brown fingers. “Now I’ll tell you the way he really strikes me. He’s not a bad sort: I shouldn’t wonder if there were more decency in him than he’d care to get credit for. But I should think,” he looked up at Val with his clear speculative hazel eyes, “that he’s never in his life taken a thrashing. He’s always had pots of money and superb health. I know nothing, of his private concerns, but at all events he isn’t married, and from what Jack says he’s sought safety in numbers. No wife, no kids, no near relations that means none of the big wrenches. No: I don’t believe Hyde’s ever taken a licking in his life.”

“You sound as if you would like to administer one.”

“Only by way of a literary experiment,” said Rowsley with his mischievous grin. He was of the new Army, Val of the old: it was a constant source of mild surprise to Val that his brother read books about philosophy, and psychology, and sociology, of which pre-war Sandhurst had never heard: read poetry too, not Tennyson or Shakespeare, but slim modern volumes with brown covers and wide margins: and wrote verses now and then, and sent them to orange-coloured magazines or annual anthologies, at which Val gazed from a respectful distance. “I don’t owe him any grudge. I’m not Bernard’s dry-nurse!”

Val turned a leaf of his paper, but he was not reading it.

“I rather wish you hadn’t said all this, Rowsley. It does no good: not even if it were true.”

“Val, if it weren’t such a warm evening I’d get up and punch your head. You’re a little too bright and good, aren’t you? Yvonne Bendish says it, and she’s Laura’s sister.”

“Yvonne would say anything. I wish you had given her a hint to hold her tongue. She may do most pestilent mischief if she sets this gossip going.”

“It’ll set itself going,” said Rowsley. “And, though I know the Bendishes pretty well, I really shouldn’t care to tell Mrs. Jack not to gossip about her own sister. You might see your way to it, reverend sir, but I don’t.”

“If it came to Bernard’s ears I wouldn’t answer for the consequences.”

“Won’t Bernard see it for himself?”

“If I thought that,” said Val, “if I thought that. . . .

“You couldn’t interfere, old man,” said Rowsley with a shrewd glance at his brother. “Your hands are tied.”

“H’m: yes, that’s true.” It was much truer than Rowsley knew. “I don’t care,” said Val, involuntarily crushing the paper in his hand: “I would not let that stand in my way: I’d speak to Hyde.”

“Are you prepared to take high ground? I can’t imagine any one less likely to be amenable to moral suasion, unless of course you’re much more intimate with him than you ever let on to me. Perhaps you are,” Rowsley added. “He certainly is interested in you.”

“Hyde is?”

“Watches you like a cat after a mouse. What’s at the root of it, Val? Is it the original obligation you spoke of? I’m not sure that I should care to be under an obligation to Hyde myself. Hullo, are you off?” Val had risen, folding the newspaper, laying it carefully down on his chair: in all his ways he was as neat as an old maid.

“I have to be at the managers’ meeting by half past eight, and it’s twenty past now.”

Watching his brother across the lawn, Rowsley cudgelled his brains to account for Val’s precipitate departure. The pretext was valid, for Val was always punctual, and yet it looked like a retreat not to say a rout. But what had he said to put Val to flight?

Present at the managers’ meeting were Val, still in breeches: Jack Bendish in a dinner jacket and black tie: Garrett the blacksmith, cursorily washed: Thurlow, a leading Nonconformist tradesman: and Mrs. Verney the doctor’s wife. Agenda: to instruct the Correspondent to requisition a new scrubbing brush for the Infants’ School. This done and formally entered in the Minutes by Mrs. Verney, the meeting resolved itself into a Committee of Ways and Means for getting rid of the boys’ headmaster without falling foul of the National Union of Teachers; but these proceedings, though of extreme interest to all concerned, were recorded in no Minutes.

The meeting broke up in amity and Bendish came out into the purple twilight, taking Val’s arm. It was gently withdrawn. “Neuritis again?” said Jack. “Why don’t you try massage?” He always asked the same question, and, being born to fifteen thousand a year, never read between the lines of Val’s vague reply. Val had a touch of neuritis in his injured arm two nights out of seven, but he could not find the shillings for his train fare to Salisbury, far less the fees of a professional masseuse. Bendish, who could have settled that difficulty out of a week’s cigar bills, would have been shocked and distressed if Val had owned to it, but it was beyond the scope of his imagination, though he was a thoughtful young man and quietly did his best to protect Val from the tax of chauffeurs and gamekeepers. He understood that poor men cannot always find sovereigns. But he really did not know that sometimes they cannot even find shillings. Tonight he said, “I can’t think why you don’t get a woman over to massage you,” and then, reverting to the peccant master, “Brown’s a nuisance. He has a rotten influence on the elder boys. He’s thick with all that beastly Labour crowd, and I believe Thurlow’s right about his goings on with Warner’s wife, though I wasn’t going to say so to Thurlow. I do wish he’d do something, then we could fire him. But we don’t want a row with the N.U.T.”

“You can’t fire a man for his political opinions.”

“Why not, if they’re wrong?” said Bendish placidly.

His was the creed that Labour men are so slow to understand because it is so slow to explain itself: not a blind prejudice, but the reasonable faith of one who feels himself to belong to an hereditary officer caste for whom privilege and responsibility go hand in hand. And an excellent working rule it is so long as practice is not divorced from theory: so long as the average member of the governing class acts up to the tradition of government, be he sachem or daïmio or resident English squire. It amused Val: but he admired it.

“Brown is a thorn in Jimmy’s side,” he remarked, dropping the impersonal issue. “I never in my life heard a man make such a disagreeable noise on the organ. I tackled him about it last Sunday. He said it ciphered, but organs don’t cipher in dry weather, so I went to look at it and found three or four keys glued together with candle grease.”

“Filthy swine! Are you coming round to Wanhope? I have to call in on my way home, my wife’s dining there.”

Val made no reply. “Are you coming up or not? You look fagged, Val,” said Bendish affectionately. “Anything wrong?”

“No: I was only wondering whether I’d get you to take a message for me, but I’d better go myself.”

Bendish nodded. “Just as you like. Have you settled yet about the Etchingham agency?”

“No, I’m waiting for Bernard.”

“Hope you’ll see your way to accepting. My only fear is that it would throw too much work on you; you’re such a conscientious beggar! but of course you wouldn’t do for us all the odd jobs you do for poor Bernard. Seems to me,” Jack ruminated, “the best plan would be for you to have a car. One gets about quicker like that and it wouldn’t be such a fag. There’s that little green Napier roadster, she’d come in handy if we stabled her at Nicholson’s.” He added simply, to obviate any possible misunderstanding, “Garage bills our show, of course.”

“Thanks most awfully,” said Val, accepting without false pride. “I should love it, I do get tired after being in the saddle all day. It would more than make up for the extra work.”

They were crossing the Wanhope lawn as he spoke, on their way to the open French windows of the parlour, gold-lit with many candles against an amethyst evening sky. Laura, in a plain black dress, was at the piano, the cool drenched foliage of Claude Debussy’s rainwet gardens rustling under her magic fingers. Bernard was talking to Mrs. Jack Bendish, for the sufficient reason that she disliked him and disliked talking to any one while Laura played. Her defiant sparkle, her gipsy features, her slim white shoulders emerging from the brocade and sapphires of a sleeveless bodice cut open almost to her waist, produced the effect of a Carolus Duran lady come to life and threw Laura back into a dimmed and tired middle age. Jack’s eyes glowed as they dwelt on her. His marriage had been a trial to his family, but no one could deny that Yvonne had made a success of it, for Jack worshipped her. Lawrence, leaning forward in his chair, his forehead on his hand to shield his eyes from the light, looked exceedingly tired, and probably was so.

“Queer chap Hyde,” said Bendish to Val as they waited on the grass for the music to finish. “Can’t think what he’s stopping on for.”

“Oh, Jack, for heaven’s sake don’t you begin on that subject!”

“Hey? Oh! No, by Jove. Seems a shame, doesn’t it?” returned Bendish, taking the point with that rapid effortless readiness of his class which made him more soothing to Val than many a cleverer man. “It all says itself, so what’s the good of saying it? All the same I shan’t be sorry when Hyde packs his movin’ tent a day’s march nearer Jerusalem.” And with a casual wink at Val he stepped over the threshold. His judgment, so vague and shrewd and sure of itself, represented probably the kindest view that would be taken in Chilmark.

Their entrance broke up the gathering. Jack carried off his wife, and Barry appeared to wheel Bernard away to bed. With a word to Laura, Val followed the cripple to his room. The Duke was pressing for an answer, and long experience had taught Val that for Bernard one time was as good as another: it was not possible to count on his moods. And there was not much to be said; all pros and cons had been thrashed out before; the five minutes while Barry was out of the room fetching Bernard’s indispensable hot-water bottles would give Val ample time to secure Bernard’s consent. Laura had scarcely finished putting away her music when Val came back, humming under his breath the jangled tune that echoes night in the streets of Granada. Laura glanced at Lawrence, who had gone into the garden to smoke and was passing and repassing the open window: no, he could not hear. “Well, Val?”

“Let me do that for you, shall I?” said Val, lightly smiling, at her. “Your ottoman has a heavy lid.”

“Have you spoken to Bernard?”

“I have.”

“And it’s all right?”

“Yes” said Val, deftly flinging diamond-wise a glittering Chinese cloth: “is that straight? that is, for me. I shan’t take the agency.”

“Val!”

“Bernard agrees with me that the double work would be too heavy. Of course I should like the money and I’m awfully sorry to disoblige Lord Grantchester and Jack, but one has one’s limitations, and I don’t want to knock up.”

“It is too bad too bad of Bernard,”. said Laura, lowering her voice as Lawrence lingered near the window. “He doesn’t half deserve your goodness to him.”

“Bosh!” said Val laughing. “Where do these candlesticks go? In my heart of hearts I’m grateful to him. I’m a cowardly beggar, Laura, and I was dreading the big financial responsibility. Oh no, Bernard didn’t put any pressure on me: simply offered me the choice between Etchingham and Wanhope.”

“They would pay you twice what you get from Bernard. Oh, Val, I wish you would take it and throw us over!”

“That’s very unkind of you.”

“Is this definite?”

“Quite: Bernard had thought it well over and made up his mind. I shouldn’t speak to him about it if I were you.”

“I shan’t. I couldn’t bear to.”

“Bosh again excuse me. I must go home. Good-night, dear.” He held out his hand, wishing, in the repressed way that had become a second nature to him, that Laura would not wring it so warmly and so long. In the first bitterness of disappointment so much the keener for his unlucky confidence to Rowsley Val could not stand sympathy. Not even from Laura? Least of all from Laura. He nodded to her with a bright careless smile and went out into the night.

But he had still one more mission to perform before he could go home to break the bad news to Rowsley: a trying mission under which Val fretted in repressed distaste. He came up to Lawrence holding out the gold cigarette case. “You dropped this at our place when you were talking to my sister this afternoon.”

“Did I?” Lawrence slipped it into his pocket. His manner was perfectly calm. “Thanks so much. I hadn’t missed it.” He had no fear of having been betrayed, in essentials, by Isabel.

“I don’t want to offend you,” Val continued with his direct simplicity of manner, “but perhaps you hardly realize how young my sister is.”

“Some one said she was nineteen, but why?”

“I don’t know what you said to her, probably nothing of the slightest consequence, but she’s only a child, and you managed to upset her. To be frank, I didn’t want her to see any one this afternoon. Oh, she’s all right, but her arm has run her up a bit of a temperature, and Verney wants her to keep quiet for a few days. It’ll give her an excuse to keep clear of the inquest too. This sounds ungrateful as well as ungracious, when we owe you so much, but there’s no ingratitude in it, only common sense.”

“Oh, damn your common sense!” exclaimed Lawrence.

It was as laconic a warning-off as civility allowed: and it irritated Lawrence beyond bearing to be rebuked by young Stafford, whose social life stood in his danger, whom he could at pleasure strip to universal crucifying shame. But there was neither defiance nor fear in Val: tranquil and unpretentious, in his force of character he reminded Lawrence of Laura Clowes. She too had been attacked once or twice that evening by her husband, and Lawrence had admired the way in which she either foiled or evaded the rapier point, or took it to her bosom without flinching. This same silken courage, it seemed, Val also possessed. Both would stand up to a blow with the same grave dignity and perhaps secret scorn.

Minutes passed. Val waited because he chose not to be the first to break silence, Lawrence because he was absorbing fresh impressions with that intensity which wipes out time and place. He was in the mood to receive them: tired, softened, and quickened, from the tears of the afternoon. After all Val was Isabel’s brother and possessed Isabel’s eyes! This drew Lawrence to him by a double cord: practically, because it is inconvenient to be on bad terms with one’s brother-in-law, and mystically, because in his profound romantic passion he loved whatever was associated with her, down to the very sprig of honeysuckle that she had pinned into his coat. But for this cord his relations with Stafford would have begun and ended in a casual regret for the casual indulgence of a cruel impulse. But Isabel’s brother had ex officio a right of entry into Hyde’s private life, and, the doors once opened, he was dazed by the light that Val let in.

It was after ten o’clock and dews were falling, falling from a clear night. “One faint eternal eventide of gems,” beading the dark turf underfoot and the pale faces of roses that had bloomed all day in sunshine: now prodigal of scent only they hung their heads like ghosts of flowers among dark glossy leaves. Stars hung sparkling on the dark field of heaven, stars threw down their spears on the dark river fleeting to the star-roofed distant Channel. Stream and grass and leaf-buds were ephemeral and eternal, ever passing and ever renewed, old as the stars, or the waste ether in which they range: the green, sappy stem, the dew-bead that hung on it, the shape of a ripple were the same now as when Nineveh was a queen of civilization and men’s flesh was reddening alive in osier cages over altar fires on Wiltshire downs. And all the sweetness, all the romance of an English midsummer night seized the heart of Lawrence, a nomad, a returned exile, and a man in love as if he had never known England before.

Or her inhabitants either! Lawrence, without country, creed, profession, or territorial obligation, was one of those sons of rich men who form, in any social order, its loosest and most self-centred class. In his set, frank egoism was the only motive for which one need not apologize. But in Chilmark it was not so. Far other forces were in play in the lives of the Stafford family, and Laura Clowes, and Lord Grantchester and his wife and Jack Bendish. What were these forces? Lawrence thought in flashes, by imagery, scene after scene flitting before him out of the last forty-eight hours. Homespun virtues: unselfishness, indifference to money values, the constant sense of filial, fraternal, social responsibility . . . the glow in Jack’s eyes when they rested on his wife: Verney’s war on cesspools: Leverton Morley as scoutmaster: the Chinese lecture: rosebushes in the churchyard, by the great stone cross with its list of names beginning “George Potts, Wiltshire Rifles, aged 49,” and ending “Robert Denis Bendish, Grenadier Guards, aged 19: Into Thy Hands, O Lord”: old, old feudal England, closeknit, no pastoral of easy virtues, yet holding together in a fellowship which underlies class disunion: whose sons, from days long before the Conquest, have always desired to go to sea when the cuckoo sang, and to come home again when they were tired of the hail and salt showers, because they could not bear to be landless and lordless men. . . .

“Swylce geac moña geomran reorde, singe sumeres weard, sorge beade bittre in breosthord; pset se beorn ne wat, secg esteadig, hwset pa sume dreoga, pe pa wrseclastas widost lecga! . . . . pince him on mode pset he his monndryhten clyppe and cysse andón cneo lecge honda and heafod; ponne onwsecne, gesihp him beforan fealwe wegas, bapian brimfuglas.”

“Even so the cuckoo warns him with its sad voice, Summer’s warden sings foreboding sorrow, bitter grief of heart. Little knows the prosperous fellow what others are doing who follow far and wide the tracks of exile . . . Then dreams the seafarer that he clasps his lord and kisses him, and on his knee lays hand and head; but he awakes and sees before him the fallow waterways and the sea-fowls bathing.”

[End of Footnote]

Lawrence flung off the impression with a jerk of his shoulders, as if it were a physical weight. It was too heavy to be endured. Not even to marry Isabel was he going to impose on his own unbroken egoism the restricting code of a country village.

“You are a dreamer, Val! Why don’t you throw over Bernard and take the Etchingham agency? Yes, I heard every word you said to Laura: you made a gallant effort, but the facts speak for themselves, and your terminological inexactitudes wouldn’t deceive a babe at the breast. Bernard pays you 300 pounds a year and orders you about like a groom, Grautchester would give you six and behave like a gentleman. But no, you must needs stick to Bernard, though you never get any thanks for it! You’re an unpractical dreamer.”

“I don’t know what on earth you’re talking about.”

And youre all in it together, damn you! Lawrence broke out with an angry laugh. Its all equally picturesque feudal’s the word! I never knew anything like it in my life and I wouldn’t have believed it could continue to exist. What do you do with gipsies? evict ’em, I suppose.” He flung a second question at Val which made the son of a vicarage knit his brows.

“As a matter of fact there’s a house in Brook Lane about which Bendish and I are a good deal exercised in our minds at the present moment . . . and the percentage of children born too soon after marriage is disastrous. You’re all out, Hyde. Nothing could be more commonplace than Chilmark, believe me: life is like this all over rural England, and it’s only from a distance that one takes it for Arcadia.”

“Folly,” said Lawrence. “Good God, why should you exercise your simple minds over the house in Brook Lane? Ah! because the men who go to it are your own men, and the parsonage and the Castle are answerable for their souls.” Val, irritated, suggested that if Hyde’s forebears had lived in Chilmark since the time when every freeman had to swear fealty, laying his hands between the knees of his lord, Hyde might have shared this feeling. “But they didn’t,” said Lawrence, drily. “My grandfather was a pawnbroker in the New Cut.”

“Then perhaps you’re hardly in a position to judge.”

“Judge? I don’t judge, my good fellow I’m lost in admiration! In an age of materialism it’s refreshing to come across these simple, homespun virtues. I didn’t know there was a man left in England that would exist, for choice, on three hundred a year. Are you always content with your rustic ideals, Val? Haven’t you any ambition?”

“I?” said Val.

“‘Carry me out of the fight,’” quoted Lawrence under his breath. “I swear I forgot.”

Silence fell again, the silence on Lawrence’s part of continual conflict and adjustment, and on Val’s mainly of irritation. Lawrence talked too much and too loosely, and was over-given to damning what he disliked a trick that went with his rings and his diamond monogram. Val was not interested in a townsman’s amateur satire; in so far as Lawrence was not satirical, he had probably drunk one glass more of Bernard’s’ champagne than was good for him! In the upshot, Val was less disinclined to credit Rowsley than half an hour ago.

Lawrence roused himself. “About your sister: I was sorry afterwards to have stayed so long. She seemed none the worse for it at the time, but no doubt she ought to keep quiet for a bit. Will you make my excuses to her?”

“I will with pleasure.”

“And will you allow me to tackle Bernard about the agency?”

“To ?”

“If you won’t resent my interfering? I can generally knock some sense into Bernard’s head. It’s an iniquitous thing that he should take advantage of your generosity, Val.”

Stafford was completely taken by surprise. “I’d rather it’s most awfully kind of you,” he stammered, “but I couldn’t trespass on your kindness

“Kindness, nonsense! Bernard’s my cousin: if your services are worth more in the open market than he pays you, it’s up to me to see he doesn’t fleece you. Otherwise you might ultimately chuck up your job, and where should we be then? In the soup: for he’d never get another man of your class a gentleman to put up with the rough side of his tongue. No: he must be brought to book: if you’ll allow me?”

Val’s disposition was to refuse; it was odious to him to accept a favour from Hyde. But pride is one of the luxuries that poor men cannot afford. “I should be most grateful. Thank you very much.”

“And now go to bed: you’re tired and so am I. I’ve had the devil of a hard day.” He stretched himself, raising his wrists to the level of his shoulders, luxuriously tense under the closefitting coat. “I shall hope to see your sister again after the inquest.”

“Yes,” said Val, hesitating: “are you staying on, then?”

“As you advised.”

“You’ll be very bored.”

“No, I’ve fallen in love.” Val gave a perceptible start. “With the country,” Lawrence explained with a merry laugh. “Rustic ideals. Don’t misjudge me, I beg: I have no designs on Mrs. Bendish.”

“Hyde . . .

“Well, my dear Val?”

“Give me back my parole.”

“Not I.”

“You’re unjust and ungenerous,” said Val with repressed passion. “But I warn you that I shall interfere none the less to protect others if necessary. Good-night.”

Lawrence watched him across the lawn with a bewildered expression. But he forgot him in a minute or remembered him only in the association with Isabel which brought Val into the radius of his good will.